Restoring New York’s Oysters

With no one cultivating oysters in the five boroughs and deteriorating water conditions, the New York oyster population took a major hit from which it has never really recovered. And because the fear of typhoid fever was already around by the time the Grand Central Oyster Bar opened, New York City oysters never made it onto their menu.

Given the sewage bath that any remaining oysters are probably living in, I’m quite content eating my oysters from farther out on Long Island . . . or maybe even trying the ones from Mexico.

Getting Charged Up About Oysters

Standing on the sandy, litter-strewn beach in Queens on a small point that sticks out into Long Island Sound, you can see the Bronx in the distance across the water. Long Island Sound is the body of water sandwiched between Connecticut and Long Island that was once considered part of the East River—and was prime oyster-growing territory.

Nearby, several seven-foot tall helical metal structures attached to pilings jut out of the water. Sitting a few feet away on the beach are square metal racks that look like over-sized versions of the cooling racks used for baking. Atop the pilings are solar panels reaching up to collect the sun’s energy and turn it into an electrical current that will charge up all this metal.

“Tom if we’re going to make a move now, I want to make it work, so I’ll spend the money to get it. Let’s just do it—we’ll get a 200-watt panel and juice the hell out of them, man,” exclaims James Cervino, a fast-talking native of Queens and marine pathologist at Pace University in New York City.

He is talking to Tom Goreau, a curly-haired, bearded geochemist with a non-profit group, the Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau is standing in waist-high water, wearing green, rubber hip waders and measuring the electric current around the base of the metal helices.

Click here to see a slideshow about the Electric Oyster Project.

Electricity, water and people typically don’t mix, but they do here at the Electric Oyster Project, the brainchild of the two scientists. They want to know if electricity can help oysters to grow in New York’s waters. Glued to the metal helices poking out of the water and sitting on the large metal racks are oysters being “juiced” with 17 volts of solar electricity, enough to power a low-wattage electric light bulb.

In previous research, Goreau has found that mild doses of electricity help sea corals to grow faster and stay healthy. Although he says that the mechanism is poorly understood, he thinks the same approach can be used with oysters. “The key thing we want to know here is how to get better survival, or better growth, or better filtration,” says Goreau.

Shelled creatures like oysters need calcium carbonate—more commonly known as limestone—to build their shells. Goreau has found that running an electric current through metal immersed in sea water plates the metal with the calcium carbonate found naturally in the surrounding water. It is possible to see faint traces of a white substance building up on the electrified metal.